Researcher Biographies

Dr. Douglas Gross is a Professor in the Department of Physical Therapy at the University of Alberta (U of A). He is also Director of the Rehabilitation Research Centre, a research consulting organization at the U of A. Doug’s research focuses on preventing disability in people with physical and mental health disorders. This includes investigating effectiveness of clinical and public health interventions, barriers to return-to-work, and validity of assessment/triage strategies such as use of clinical decision support tools. 

He has given numerous national and international presentations and published over 110 articles and chapters. He has contributed to research projects totaling over $9 million, and his teams have been the recipients of several recent awards for research excellence.

Dr. Gupta joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Alberta in September 2014 as an Assistant Professor. She has over 20 years of research experience and obtained her PhD. in Electrical Engineering from Yale University in 2009 with a MSc from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2002. She has been involved in different areas of research and development in academia, scientific labs and industry. She has conducted material growth and optimization, device design and fabrication for both electronic and optoelectronic applications, semiconductor fabrication including material and electrical characterization, surface functionalization. She has developed device based sensors for biosensing and optical sensors for solid content detection and label free cell detection. She also has industrial experience of working at a start-up company and at ACAMP in Edmonton. Her lab has recently developed a POC SARS-COV2 sensor recently which has been transferred to a local company for commercialization. Also, she is currently working on developing diabetic wound multi-variate sensors using 3D printing. In addition, her group also conducts work in the area of 2D materials, electronic devices, light scattering based detection and nano photonics. 

Dr. Ehsan Hashemi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Alberta. He is the principal investigator of the Networked Optimization, Diagnosis, and Estimation (NODE) laboratory. 

His research focuses on cooperative autonomous systems, networked control systems, human-autonomy interaction, robot perception, and biomechatronics, with direct applications in reliable and safe human-robot controls, state estimation, and decision making in rehabilitative and intelligent assistive technologies.  

Dr. Jake Hayward is an emergency physician and clinician-scientist focused on health systems and digital health research. He completed medical training at the University of Alberta and a Masters of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. He serves as a Deputy Clinical Department Head in Quality for the Edmonton Zone. His research goals are to develop and evaluate digital technologies that can improve clinical care and population-level health policy. He is currently investigating the role of wearable devices in safer transitions from hospital to home, and vice-versa.

Dr. Chester Ho is a clinician, researcher and health services administrator in the field of spinal cord injury (SCI) rehabilitation. His focus is health services delivery, as well as the management and rehabilitation of complications following SCI, such as pressure injuries and the use of functional electrical stimulation in the promotion of function and mobility. Another major focus of his work is on the implementation of evidence-based treatments such as functional electrical stimulation (FES) cycling for exercise training after SCI.

He has created a regional program for the use of functional electrical stimulation cycling that spans from the inpatient rehabilitation setting to the community in Calgary, Alberta, and is in the process of creating international, evidence-based clinical practice guidelines on the use of FES cycling after SCI, which will facilitate further clinical adoption of this treatment.

Dr. Greg Kawchuk is a professor in Rehab Medicine and Physical Therapy. His research interests focus on defining the mechanisms that initiate and sustain spinal disorders so that clinically relevant strategies can be developed toward their prevention or resolution. A major component of his research involves developing new technologies to assess spinal structure and function, then using those technologies to evaluate various clinical interventions. 

Dr. Bradley Kerr received his BSc in Psychology from McGill University. He then went on to obtain a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of London-King’s College in the UK. His PhD research was aimed at understanding the role of novel modulatory peptides, growth factors and pro-inflammatory cytokines in persistent pain. Dr. Kerr went on to do postdoctoral work at the California Institute of Technology and at McGill University where his work focused on studying inflammatory responses after nervous system injury. 

Dr. Kerr joined the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at the University of Alberta in 2007 and is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Psychiatry. The focus of research in his lab is aimed at addressing the mechanisms of chronic pain after injury or disease with a major focus on chronic pain associated with Multiple Sclerosis.

Dr. Reisa Klein (she/her) is a Senior Officer, Major Initiatives in the Office of the Vice-President (Research and Innovation) and an Adjunct Academic Colleague in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta.

With a PhD in Communication from Carleton University, her research broadly examines technological and mediated practices of embodiment, gender and health through an intersectional lens. Her current research investigates emerging practices of tattooing by breast cancer patients in the cosmetic masking of post-operative mastectomy scars and their implications for a digital feminist body politics. Other projects include the examination of tattooing practices in response to individual and collective trauma including in the contexts of self-harm, sexual assault, systemic racism, antisemitism and colonization.

Recent publications include: ‘When the phallus is a “dick”: The cultural/material turn to breasts’ (With D. Woodman) in the Routledge Companion to Gender, Sexuality and Culture (2022) and ‘Chosen scars: Breast cancer and mastectomy tattooing as digital feminist body politics’ in Talking Bodies Vol. II: Bodily Languages, Selfhood and Transgression (2020).

Dr. Michael Lipsett is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Alberta (U of A). Mike had a career in industrial R&D and operations in the Canadian nuclear and oil industries prior to joining the U of A in 2006. He currently holds the Poole Chair in Management for Engineers and is Director of Innovation, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship for the Faculty of Engineering. 

His research interests focus on automating diagnostics to improve the reliability of complex energy and environmental systems. He also develops robotic systems for remote and hazardous environments. Mike has 150+ published works on these and related topics. 

Dr. Adalberto Loyola-Sanchez completed his medical and specialty training in Mexico City and his research training at McMaster University (MSc and PhD, Vanier scholar) and at the University of Calgary (postdoctoral studies, Banting scholar). Since then, he has been working on developing a program of research to design, implement and evaluate community-based rehabilitation programs for people living with disabilities produced by chronic illnesses. This program has mainly focused on under-served populations (i.e. Indigenous rural communities in Mexico and Canada).

He is currently working clinically in the Spinal Cord Injury Program at the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton, and is working on expanding his program of research to include the neurological population, especially Spinal Cord Injury. 

Dr. Christopher McCabe is the CEO and Executive Director of the Institute of Health Economics (IHE).  Dr. McCabe brings more than 25 years of experience as a health economist to his role with the organization. He trained and worked for 20 years in the UK before emigrating to Canada. During this time he held Full Professorships at the Universities of Sheffield, Warwick and Leeds. He was more recently a Professor of Health Economics at the University of Alberta, where he was appointed Capital Health Endowed Research Chair at the University of Alberta, leading two Genome Canada research groups focused on the evaluation, adoption and implementation of Precision Medicine technologies. 

He also served on the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health Care (CADTH) Health Economics Working Group, which authored the 4th Edition of the CADTH Guidelines for the Economic Evaluation of Health Technologies in 2017. He was lead author of the addendum to the CADTH Guidelines focused on co-dependent therapies, published in 2019. More recently Dr. McCabe advised the Patented Medicines Price Review Board on the technical issues related to the revision of their regulations for setting the price of new drugs in Canada. He is currently Chair of the Royal Society of Canada COVID Task Force Working Group on the Economy.

Dr. Rashid Mirzavand Boroujeni is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada, where he leads the Intelligent Wireless Technology Group. He is also an Adjunct Professor with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Alberta and an Adjunct Fellow with the Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. He was the co-founder and the chief technology officer of three companies in the smart sensor (SenZIoT), near-field measurement (Anteligen), and wireless power transfer technologies (WiDyne) from the University of Alberta. 

His work focuses on developing sensors and wireless sensor networks for smart health, home, and infrastructure applications. He also focuses on developing radio frequency systems, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces and antennas, and measurement systems. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and Specialty Chief Editor for Frontiers in the Internet of Things (IoT Enabling Technologies Section).

Dr. Milad Nazarahari began his tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alberta in January 2023. He is internationally recognized for his contributions to human movement analysis with wearable technologies. His current research is focused on developing cost-effective and efficient robotic systems to deliver assessment and intervention with minimum supervision as well as markerless motion capture systems for human movement analysis for out of the lab applications. He is a Research Affiliate with the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton and the Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute at the University of Alberta. Prior to his appointment at the University of Alberta, he was an AMTD Waterloo Global Talent Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Waterloo for almost a year and a half, conducting human motor control studies using a robotic system. He received his Ph.D. in August 2021 from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alberta. He also obtained his MSc and BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology.

Dr. Marilène Oliver works at a crossroads between new digital technologies, traditional print and sculpture, her finished objects bridging the virtual and the real worlds. Oliver uses various scanning technologies, such as MRI and CT to reclaim the interior of the body and create art works that allow us to materially contemplate our increasingly digitized selves. Her current research focuses on using medical scan data to create artistic XR experiences as part of multimedia installations.  

Marilène Oliver is an assistant professor of printmaking at the University of Alberta, Canada. Oliver studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art where she obtained an MPhil with research project ‘Flesh to Pixel, Flesh to Voxel, Flesh to XYZ’. Oliver has exhibited internationally in both private and public galleries including the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Wellcome Trust (UK), MassMoCA, Knoxville Museum of Art (USA) Frissarias Museum (Greece), Casino Luxembourg (Luxembourg), Fundació Sorigué(Spain) and The Glenbow Museum (Canada).

Her work is held in a number of private collections around the world as well as a number of public collections such as The Wellcome Trust, Victoria and Albert Museum and Knoxville Museum of Art. Oliver leads several interdisciplinary research projects including Dyscorpia: Future Intersections of the Body and Technology and Know Thyself as a Virtual Reality. Oliver is also the host of LASERAlberta, a public series of art and science events which is part of the international Leonardo/ISAST network.

Dr. Danielle Peers is a Canada Research Chair in Disability and Movement Cultures (Tier II SSHRC), and an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta. 

Their research builds on their experiences as a Paralympic athlete, National Ambassador for Muscular Dystrophy Canada, social justice activist, and dance and video artist. Their work in each of these areas often overlap, with qualitative, interdisciplinary, and art-based and research-creation methodologies often used to produce and share knowledge.

Dr. Patrick Pilarski is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and principal investigator with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute and the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (RLAI).

Dr. Pilarski’s research interests include reinforcement learning, real-time machine learning, human-machine interaction, rehabilitation technology, and assistive robotics.  Within the SMART Network's BLINC Lab (Bionic Limbs for Improved Natural Control) , he leads an interdisciplinary initiative focused on creating intelligent artificial limbs to restore and extend abilities for people with amputations. 

Dr. Jason Plemel began his training in the laboratory of Dr. Wolfram Tetzlaff where he completed his Doctorate. There he investigated two separate strategies to improve white matter regeneration: transplantation of precursor cells to replace lost oligodendrocytes and cell culture to find novel targets to improve remyelination. During Dr. Plemel’s postdoctoral work he studied the contribution of microglia following myelin injury in the laboratories of Dr. Peter Stys and Dr. Wee Yong. His interdisciplinary project investigated mechanisms of how immune cells respond to primary degeneration. As well, he developed a new tool to image cell death and injury using spectral microscopy.

As a new faculty at the University of Alberta, Dr. Plemel and his laboratory, Alberta Neuroimmunology and Pain Laboratory are investigating how microglia play an important role in the regeneration of injured white matter, but also how microglia can induce injury to white matter during different disease conditions.

Dr. Carla Prado is a Professor and Registered Dietitian at the University of Alberta, and a Campus Alberta Innovates (CAIP) Chair in Nutrition, Food and Health. She is the Director of the Human Nutrition Research Unit, one of the top research and training facilities for body composition and energy metabolism assessments worldwide. 

Carla is an expert in assessing nutritional status through the precise measurement of body composition and energy metabolism. She is an Associate Editor of Clinical Nutrition, the Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle, and Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and  Metabolic Care. Dr. Prado is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, the highest academic honor in the country for early career researchers and has recently received the title of Canada’s Most Powerful Women: Top 100.

Dr. Romanyk is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, with and Adjunct appointment in the School of Dentistry, at the University of Alberta. His primary areas of research surround the mechanical characterization of natural and synthetic biomaterials in the craniofacial environment, and studying the biomechanics of orthodontic treatment. Surrounding natural biomaterials, Dr. Romanyk specifically focuses on the relationship between mechanical state and the corresponding biological response for cranial suture and periodontal ligament tissues. When considering synthetic biomaterials, he is largely focused on the mechanical performance of dental restorative materials such as ceramics and resin-based composites. Dr. Romanyk's research in orthodontic biomechanics utilizes a combination of world-leading in vitro experimental equipment, numerical simulations, and clinical data to better understand the force systems that orthodontic appliances produce and how they influence treatment outcomes.